We still have performers famous enough to be identified by their first name only and to attract large audiences, but the main interest in the best-known ones these days lies in whether they'll get jailed or publicly display their genitals. "Ella" refers to America's most honored jazz singer, Ella Fitzgerald, who was not only queen of an earlier era when jazz concerts reached an international peak, but also had almost no personal biography that her fans were especially aware of. That universal admiration and lack of notoriety explains why Jeffrey Hatcher's play is a better concert than musical drama.
It is, in fact, a dazzling concert. Tina Fabrique has a great voice of her own, a bit darker and rougher than Ella's and perhaps even bigger. A seasoned Broadway and touring actress and established international concert singer and recording artist, Fabrique recreates Ella and amazingly reproduces Ella's stylings note for note, but she does not merely do an Ella impersonation, though she does physically resemble Ella. Backed up by first class jazz musicians, she gets to perform intact a whole concert of Ella Fitzgerald favorites: "It Don't Mean A Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)", "Blue Skies," "How High The Moon," "A Tisket A Tasket," "Mr. Paganini," "That Old Black Magic," "Lady Be Good," and many more all more satisfying and informative than Hatcher's dialogue.
Harold Dixon warmly establishes himself as Ella's understanding manager/advisor Norman Granz. Her terrific band, Rodney Harper, Clifton Kellem, and Thad Wilson, led by conductor/pianist George Caldwell, also each have featured acting moments both as her historic accompanying musicians and also as other men in her life. But they, too, are better than their dialogue.
I like Hatcher's plays. He seems to turn out one every few days. The many that I've seen in theaters all over and read in manuscripts submitted for awards that I've voted for him to get are almost all of them arresting and entertaining. But here he's settled for some unconvincing pretense to cram in biographical details: we see Ella about to unwillingly give a concert in Nice in 1966 just after her beloved half-sister's death; she thinks back on the events of her life that led her to this moment. Her longtime manager insists that she cut one number from the concert in order to engage the audience with "patter"; and much of what we hear Ella say is supposed to be that "patter." After the show's curtain calls, that mechanical device also sets up a final "encore" of the "omitted number."
When Ella has to reach out to her neglected son (supposed to be in the audience) and interrupt her performance to inform him that he is actually her adopted nephew, son of the sister whom she has just lost, even an actress as skilled as Tina Fabrique can't make the moment seem real. She seems truly full of emotion, but along with all the other problems she is forced to try to express it in one of Ella's less-great ballads. One can only wonder what the mostly French audience in Nice would have thought of all that carrying-on.
Except for the knock-out trumpet player in the band (who manages an amusing Louis Armstrong imitation), the other three musicians (and the music supervisor and arranger and stage manager) all worked on a musical-biography show I liked better -- Marion J. Caffey's Cookin' at the Cookery, about Alberta Hunter. But superbly though that show was performed, I'd rather listen to a recording of Ella, which is almost as musically rewarding as the concerts I attended by the real Ella Fitzgerald.
Ella has played all over this country and is scheduled to continue through 2009, when it may move to London's West End. Broadway is unlikely to see it before 2010. If only for Tina Fabrique's virtuoso performance, it's worth the wait.
